Alexander Litvinenko: A very Russian poisoning

Three years ago, a Soviet defector was assassinated on British soil. Why was
he murdered? And who was behind it? In the most detailed account of the
killing yet, former Russian military intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky
reveals all

Alexander Litvinenko in hospital in November 2006, three days before he diedPhoto: Getty/Natasja Weitsz

Andrei Lugovoy, the former KGB officer charged with Litvinenko's murder

December 7, 2006 was a lousy day. Only hours before the event, a secret message was delivered to a small circle of people invited to attend the burial of Colonel Alexander 'Sasha’ Litvinenko in London’s Highgate Cemetery.

Oleg Gordievsky, a famous British spy within the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence), his companion Maureen and myself, a former captain of the GRU Spetsnaz (Russian special forces), arrived in London, soon finding the designated gate at the cemetery surrounded by hundreds of television cameras and photographers. A small, solemn group of mourners gathered under a wooden overhang, anticipating rain.

The group included Marina, Sasha’s widow, Boris Berezovsky, a business tycoon and fierce opponent of the Putin regime, and Akhmed Zakayev, an exiled Chechen leader. Then I spotted Alex Goldfarb, Berezovsky’s associate, whom I had first met together with Sasha almost two years before; and Walter and Maxim Litvinenko, Sasha’s father who had come from Russia and younger half-brother who had just arrived from Italy.

I did not notice then that Vladimir Bukovsky, a famous Russian dissident, was also there, together with Litvinenko’s first wife and their two children.

It was raining heavily as we accompanied Sasha to his final resting place. Alex Goldfarb recalls: 'It took two weeks before the authorities gave clearance for Sasha’s funeral. His body presented a major environmental hazard and we were told that it would be released to us in a special sealed casket, provided by the Health Protection Agency. Should the family wish to cremate him, they would have to wait for 28 years, until the radioactivity decays to safe levels – nearly 80 half-lives of polonium-210.’

Most people become celebrities because of their extraordinary lives. Sasha Litvinenko became a celebrity because of his extraordinary death.

His first claim to fame was on November 17, 1998 when, together with other officers from the FSB (Russia’s Security Service), he alleged in a press conference that he had been given orders to murder Boris Berezovsky, until recently the deputy secretary of the Security Council of Russia.

Not only was the FSB publicly accused of organising murders or conspiring to do so, it was also the first time that active duty officers had spoken out against the kontora (bureau), as the security service is mockingly called in Russia.

Vladimir Putin had been the FSB director for four months. He had been actively flirting with Berezovsky and Yeltsin’s group of closest presidential advisers (that had become known as 'The Family’). But now he sided with the service. The whistle-blowers were sacked and their unit disbanded.

In March 1999, lieutenant colonels Alexander Litvinenko and Alexander Gusak, his department chief, were arrested and put into Lefortovo prison for 'exceeding their official powers and causing bodily harm to witnesses’, without any mention of the press conference.

Sasha described Lefortovo as a place that 'crushed you spiritually’. 'There’s some negative energy coming from those walls. They say that birds avoid flying over it. Perhaps it’s the legacy of the old days when Lefortovo was a place of mass executions and torture.’

Freedom in the West

Sasha was released months later, on the condition that he wouldn’t leave Moscow. His passports were confiscated but he had to carry identity papers, and he used these in August 2000 to travel with Marina for a 'vacation’ on the Black Sea. In reality, Sasha was preparing his escape.

By that time quotas for defectors were virtually non-existent, yet with the aid of Berezovsky, who had by now established himself as an émigré in Britain, and Alex Goldfarb, an associate of Boris’s, Litvinenko managed to arrive in Britain. On November 1 2000, the Litvinenkos landed at London Heathrow. For Sasha, the six-year and 23-day countdown began.

Berezovsky saw Sasha as a trusted associate and a friend. The family was put up in an apartment in Kensington and Litvinenko was provided with a £5,000 allowance. Boris was probably planning for Sasha to become his counter-intelligence chief – it was a challenge to unmask the Russian secret agents he believed were operating inside his close circle.

Their primary target, he was convinced, was himself.

Sasha was happy in London. Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen leader in exile, soon became a close friend and, as a former operative in Chechnya, Sasha actively contributed to the Chechen government commission investigating Russian war crimes during the Chechen wars.

Not long after he was granted political asylum in May 2001, he started assisting the Mitrokhin Commission of the Italian parliament that was examining documents revealing KGB activities in Italy. He also became friends with Mario Scaramella, a naïve but enthusiastic adviser to the commission – and the man he would later wrongly identify as his poisoner. Which, in my view, was just what Moscow intended.

Operation 'Vladimir’

Four weeks before Sasha was granted political asylum, a man called Nikolai Glushkov left his Moscow hospital ward wearing only a gown and slippers. Glushkov, a top manager of Aeroflot and one of Berezovsky’s business partners, had been arrested by Russian authorities on what would prove to be unfounded fraud charges and admitted to hospital at Moscow’s Scientific Haematological Centre for a blood condition. That evening he was going home as usual for an overnight stay.

As Glushkov was about to get into a waiting car driven by a friend and colleague, a squad of FSB officers appeared and charged him with 'attempted escape from custody’.

As Glushkov told the former dissident Alex Goldfarb years later in London, he was convinced it was a set-up. He clearly had no intention of escaping. Yet it was not just Glushkov who was imprisoned. One Andrei Lugovoy, the former head of security for ORT (a popular Russian television channel that belonged to Berezovsky), was found guilty of conspiracy to organise the escape and served a prison term of 14 months.

I will always remember Sasha’s words about Lefortovo 'crushing you spiritually’. Yet Lugovoy marched out of prison a millionaire and quickly obtained a licence to run his own security firm. His company, NinthWave (he served in the KGB’s 9th Directorate, the home of government bodyguards), became one of the biggest security agencies in Moscow, providing services to visiting celebrities, businessmen and banks.

The year was 2006 and it was proving fruitful for Sasha Litvinenko. His articles for the Chechen press had become fierce and crushing, recalling the style of the great Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whom he revered and respected, while his attacks on President Putin became increasingly bold.

Sasha was also eager to start working for one of London’s many private companies providing a discreet service 'of comprehensive business intelligence, investigation and security risk management to its financial, legal and corporate clients around the world’, as it was formulated on the website of one such institution. Therefore he had high expectations for his newly formed friendship with Andrei Lugovoy, a possible source in Russia.

They had met in Moscow in the Nineties when both worked for Berezovsky. Then, in the autumn of 2005, Lugovoy had called Sasha out of the blue and suggested a meeting to discuss some possible business together. Sasha had other sources, but Lugovoy seemed the most promising. And more importantly, everybody, including Boris, trusted him.

In April 2006, Lugovoy was in London – one of a dozen visits that year. Until contacting Sasha the previous autumn he had never been to Britain. Along with an interpreter they went to a pre-arranged meeting with a risk management company at 1 Cavendish Place.

The visitors said they had insider information that could be of interest and Lugovoy produced a document that he claimed could not have come from an open source. Litvinenko was later informed that the product was satisfactory. A fee followed.

Sasha cherished hopes for easy profits, but there was no reason to celebrate. In reality, the document was based on previously published sources produced by the Centre for Political Information (CPI) and could be easily accessed via their internet site.

On October 7, 2006, news came from Moscow announcing the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. Sasha showed no hesitation in pointing the finger at the man he believed responsible. 'Only one person in Russia could kill a journalist of her standing, only one person could sanction her death,’ he told an audience at Paddington’s Frontline Club. 'And this person is Putin.’

By that time, the assassination operation code-named 'Vladimir’ – masterminded in Moscow – was in full swing.

The dress rehearsal

The executive phase of the Litvinenko operation started days after Politkovskaya’s death. As reconstructed later by Scotland Yard investigators, it began with a puzzle.

On October 16, two newly arrived passengers from Moscow proceeded to the immigration hall at London Heathrow, eventually checking into the Shaftesbury Hotel in Soho.

Sasha didn’t expect to see his friend Lugovoy with anybody else, but Lugovoy introduced his companion as Dmitry Kovtun, who had recently joined NinthWave. According to Lugovoy, they had graduated from the same military school and were childhood friends.

After an introductory meeting at a private security company, Sasha invited the Russians to Itsu on Piccadilly. Later, Lugovoy and Kovtun dined alone at a Moroccan restaurant.

The next day, the Russians suddenly checked out of the Shaftesbury Hotel and moved into the Parkes Hotel in Knightsbridge. After dining with Sasha again, this time in Chinatown, Lugovoy and Kovtun proceeded to the Hey Jo/Abracadabra Private Members’ club on Jermyn Street.

They returned to Moscow the next day. As was learnt later, both hotels, Itsu, the Moroccan restaurant and the club were contaminated with polonium-210. How did the two men leave so many traces behind them two weeks before they met Litvinenko again on November 1? While discussing the puzzle with Metropolitan police detectives in December, I was able to suggest only one possible scenario. Now I think there may be more.

Lugovoy returned to London on October 25. After a dress rehearsal with Kovtun nine days before, it appears it was decided to stage another practice run. To cover his tracks, Lugovoy brought a hastily compiled report for another risk analysis company. Three days later he left for Moscow. British Airways later discovered traces of radiation on the aircraft he arrived and departed on.

In the meantime, Kovtun flew to Germany, ostensibly to visit his ex-wife and her family. On October 30, while Kovtun holidayed in Hamburg, Mario Scaramella in Naples received the first of two emails from a man calling himself 'Eugenio Lomov’.

Their contents were frightening: the first warned of Russian intelligence officers’ anger at Scaramella’s 'incessant anti-Russian activities’. The second, received by Scaramella later in London, reported that a gang of professional killers from St Petersburg had already arrived in Naples. Their targets, it was asserted, included the former president of the Mitrokhin Commission, Paolo Guzzanti, as well as Scaramella, Berezovsky and Litvinenko.

Scaramella knew the sender. He was Evgeny Limarev, a self-styled Russian intelligence expert who had settled in France and managed to establish relations with Berezovsky’s circle. In my opinion the direct-threat tactics were designed to push Scaramella into a meeting with Sasha exactly when Moscow planners wanted him to be there. It worked.

It had been known long before that Scaramella was going to London to attend the next session of the International Maritime Organisation. But this time, after alarming messages from his trusted 'source’ (Limarev), the Italian made sure to arrange a meeting with Sasha as soon as possible. In the event, Sasha dismissed the threats as 'bull----’.

But their meeting in Itsu on the afternoon of November 1 was enough to make Scaramella a prime suspect, particularly when Sasha himself accused the Italian of foul play.

In late November 2006, the situation worsened when doctors apparently found (it was a mistake) a deadly level of polonium-210 in Scaramella’s body and the authorities sealed off Itsu for decontamination. In Italy, the papers first suspected him of the poisoning and then, after the British police had dropped all charges against him, accused Scaramella of inventing his own polonium contamination.

On October 31, Lugovoy arrived at Heathrow with his wife and children, and his friend and NinthWave employee, Vyacheslav Sokolenko. The Russian party had taken three rooms at the Millennium Hotel in Grosvenor Square: one on the first and one on the fourth floor for the Lugovoy family, and one on the third for Sokolenko. The booking for Lugovoy specifically requested room 441.

At about 5am on November 1, Kovtun’s former mother-in-law drove him to the airport to catch his flight to London. His presence in Germany would have passed unnoticed if, weeks later, a postman had not put a copy of Der Spiegel in the post box of the Hamburg police headquarters. An article, entitled 'Death sentence from Moscow’, reported on Litvinenko’s suspected poisoning and mentioned Kovtun by name, saying that he came from Hamburg.

German police began by searching the apartments where Kovtun had stayed and followed the trail from there. They did not have to wait long for results: a pale lilac glow of polonium-210 lit up across Hamburg.

The poisoning

London, the Millennium Hotel. On the morning of November 1, while Vyacheslav Sokolenko took his friend Lugovoy’s family sightseeing, Lugovoy remained in the hotel to 'do some business’. Sasha, who had come to meet Lugovoy in his room, paid little attention to a new face, a man whom Lugovoy introduced as another Russian businessman with good connections.

The man didn’t say much and remained largely unnoticed while Lugovoy talked excitedly about liquidised gas and copper that he claimed were easily available at below market prices and could be exported to Latin America with great profits. Did Sasha have anybody there?

Sasha did. And he was excited. Millions, bloody millions could be made! He’d be rich and he wouldn’t have to bother with complicated analytical reports for which he wasn’t qualified. Now he could take Marina and Tolik around the world.

Sasha looked at his watch. He had to go and meet an Italian friend around the corner but could see them again in an hour. They shook hands, and, smiling, Sasha left the room.

The man’s instructions were brief. Lugovoy must leave the room. He’d do the cleaning. They would not see each other again. Quickly, but very carefully, the undistinguished man in room 441 collected Alexander Litvinenko’s empty cup of tea wearing special gloves and a mask, and put it in a small container near the dustbin. He did his best not to leave a drop but that was hardly possible.

'The assassins… dropped the polonium on the floor of a London hotel room,’ a senior government source told The Daily Telegraph on December 1. By 5.15pm the man would be boarding a ferry to Esbjerg, Denmark. A waiting officer would take care of his cargo.

The next time Sasha saw Lugovoy he was celebrating in a rather small hotel bar. His friend Kovtun, who had already drunk six gin and tonics, was also there. The Russians knew perfectly well that Sasha was teetotal and pointed to the cup of green tea that was already cold. Sasha asked for a fresh pot.

While it was being prepared, Lugovoy went upstairs to check the room and found it in perfect order. He would later be exasperated by the fact that his clothes and personal items as well as those of his wife and children appeared to be contaminated with polonium-210.

By 7.30pm Sasha was at home preparing for a festive dinner – his favourite, Russian 'chicken-on-a-bottle’. It had been exactly six years since he, Marina and Tolik stepped on British soil. At about 11pm Sasha Litvinenko began to die.

A mystery illness

In the morning Sasha called Lugovoy to say that he wasn’t feeling well and probably wouldn’t be able to make their morning meeting. He complained of stomach ache and promised to call again later that evening. He did, only to say that it wasn’t improving. Lugovoy and his party left for Moscow the next day.

At 2am on November 3, Sasha asked his wife to call an ambulance: 'I can’t hold on anymore.’ The following day, he couldn’t walk.

On November 6, he phoned Oleg Gordievsky from his hospital bed in Barnet. Sasha was suspicious he could have been deliberately poisoned. He told Gordievsky that the only man who could have poisoned him was Mario Scaramella. Gordievsky, who disliked the Italian, agreed. Marina was terrified.

On Wednesday, November 15, Alex Goldfarb started to worry. As he put it: two weeks was just a bit too long for food poisoning. Goldfarb asked whether the hospital had notified the police. 'At this point the cause can be benign or sinister,’ he was told. 'We’re waiting for a toxicology report.’

The next morning Sasha was worse. The inflammation of his gastrointestinal tract had become so painful he could barely talk or swallow. It was as if his insides had been burned by an unknown irritant.

With Sasha’s help, Alex Goldfarb remembers trying to recreate Sasha’s movements on the day of the poisoning. 'His last meeting with Lugovoy,’ recalls Goldfarb, 'was in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel, two hours after he went out with Mario Scaramella. Lugovoy was with another Russian, Sasha said, whom Sasha had not met before. “He had the eyes of a killer,” he said. He knew the type.’

The human memory isn’t perfect. The 'other Russian’ with Lugovoy in the bar was not someone Sasha hadn’t met, but Dmitry Kovtun, a man with whom he had had a few meals and spent quite some time, calling him Dima – a diminutive form for Dmitry.

The problem was that Marina and Alex only knew about the late afternoon meeting in the Pine Bar. When Litvinenko told them that Lugovoy brought along a man whom Sasha had never seen before and who had 'the eyes of a killer’, he was actually thinking of the man he had met in Lugovoy’s hotel room four hours before the second meeting.

This was a man who, like Kovtun some days earlier, had been introduced by Lugovoy as a business partner. A man who had boarded a ferry within hours of doing his dirty work. Neither Marina nor Alex could follow what Sasha was saying, as they knew nothing of that earlier meeting. And neither of them had ever heard of Kovtun, so for them he was a new man.

November 17 produced more confusion. A newspaper reported 'a suspected plot to assassinate a former Russian spy in Britain by poisoning him with thallium, the deadly metal’. This was following a toxicology test identifying the presence of the poison.

In fact, the test only revealed that the amount of thallium in Sasha’s body was much higher than the norm. Nothing more. Doctors were on the wrong trail.

On November 22, Sasha’s heart stopped. Marina was called to the hospital at 11.50pm. When she arrived, Sasha’s heart stopped again.

On Thursday, November 23, at 9.21pm, Colonel Alexander Litvinenko died. In a statement composed two days before this tragic event – and released to reporters outside University Hospital the day after – Sasha left a personal message for the man he believed responsible for his by then inevitable death: 'You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value. You may succeed in silencing one man. But a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.’

Just three hours before he passed away, a specialised laboratory (the Atomic Weapons Establishment, which is under the authority of the Ministry of Defence) finally managed to figure out what had killed him: a substance called polonium-210.

Nick Priest, professor of environmental toxicology at Middlesex University, later speculated that before it was taken to London, the poison would have been divided between four people. He never explained why four, and not two or five, but elaborated that the toxin had to be recombined in a hotel room. According to Professor Priest, that’s when the trouble would have begun: at the moment the seal was broken the spider of contamination started to spin its web of 'soiling’.

Professor Priest’s supposition explained how and why the pair got contaminated on October 16 and why they hurriedly left the Shaftesbury Hotel in Soho only hours after they arrived there, and moved to the more expensive Parkes Hotel on the other side of the city, otherwise far too luxurious for such travellers.

'It’s entirely possible,’ Professor Priest surmised, 'that they didn’t know what they were handling or they would have taken precautions. It’s possible they were only told it was poison. Otherwise they might have been frightened.

'Also, if you knew the properties of polonium, you would change your clothes [after lacing the tea] and then throw them away. You’d use gloves. You’d have to be an idiot to leave a contamination trail behind.’

I doubt that they had any idea it was a radiological weapon. Weeks after the events, while undergoing tests in Moscow Hospital No.6, Kovtun continued to call the substance 'poloniumum’ in a German television interview.

Russia reacts

In Moscow, they had not expected the use of polonium to surface, so they were poorly prepared. The fact that the Russian secret services publicly denied that they had anything to do with Litvinenko’s murder, describing the allegations as 'nonsense’, is highly unusual. Normally, they never comment.

I must also emphasise that assassination by poisoning is a covert operation. It is designed only to kill the victim, quietly and unobtrusively. In all the Russian poisonings that I have studied over the years, this is an unbreakable principle. As a rule, chance plays an important role in uncovering a crime and its perpetrator. Seventy years ago, a box of sweets found in an abandoned hotel room helped to reconstruct the murder of another Russian dissident.

On May 22, 2007, the British Crown Prosecution Service charged Andrei Lugovoy with Sasha’s murder, a charge he never had to answer because Russia refused to extradite him. Kovtun was not made a suspect when the CPS charged Lugovoy, but, until recently, he was still under investigation by the German police following the discovery of the polonium trail. His police file has now been closed. Despite press speculation, Vyacheslav Sokolenko has never been an official suspect. All three deny any involvement in Litvinenko’s murder.

The first public event Moscow organised for Lugovoy, Kovtun and Sokolenko was an interview on November 24, 2006, on the popular Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy. On the show they were presented as a successful Russian businessman and producer of wine and non-alcoholic drinks (Lugovoy); an expert in foreign investments into the Russian market (Kovtun); and a modest representative of the group of companies called NinthWave engaged in personal protection, in his free time a great football fan (Sokolenko).

They all admitted graduating from the same military school but Kovtun failed to mention that he was a former army officer and an FSB seksot (collaborator). Sokolenko forgot to say that, like Lugovoy, he had served first in the KGB’s 9th Directorate and then in the Federal Protection Service (FSO), which is similar to America’s Secret Service.

Throughout 2007 a media war raged. On one side there was the Kremlin propaganda facility pulling its punches. On the other, a group of people in different countries did their best to learn and tell the world what happened to Colonel Alexander Litvinenko.

The conclusion of the CPS, based on a meticulous police investigation, was unequivocal – it was a murder and Lugovoy was charged with this crime. It was clearly 'Made in Russia’ but Russia refused - and still refuses - to extradite him. Instead, he was rewarded by being elected to the Federal Assembly and promoted. He is now Colonel Andrei Lugovoy.